Thailand, 1996

On behalf of the

Government and people of Thailand, I should like to extend

my warmest congratulations to Your Excellency upon your

election to the presidency of the General Assembly at its

fifty-first session, which marks the beginning of the next

half-century for the United Nations. I am confident that,

with your leadership and guidance, this session will mark

a successful beginning for the work of the United Nations

in the next 50 years and in the new century.

From what we have seen so far, you are already off to

a good start. By insisting on beginning our meetings on

time over the past three weeks and not succumbing to the

traditional half-hour delay before starting the meetings, you

have, in effect, prevented the wastage of both time and

money for the United Nations and its Member States. This

act is truly an admirable display of leadership. My

delegation looks forward to seeing more such constructive

initiatives in the future.

As a close neighbour of Malaysia and a fellow

member of the Association of South-East Asian Nations,

Thailand is particularly pleased to see you in this important

office. You can count on my delegation’s fullest

cooperation in all your endeavours at this session.

My delegation also wishes to take this opportunity to

express its sincere appreciation to Mr. Diogo Freitas

do Amaral of Portugal, the President of the historic fiftieth

session of the General Assembly, for his most

commendable efforts in making the fiftieth session and

the fiftieth anniversary year of the United Nations truly

monumental and fruitful.

My delegation is especially grateful to Mr. Freitas

do Amaral for his role in facilitating the work of the

General Assembly’s working groups on the reform of the

United Nations, particularly the Open-ended Working

Group on the Question of Equitable Representation on

and Increase in the Membership of the Security Council

and other matters related to the Security Council. Under

his stewardship, that Working Group was able to adopt,

for the first time, a substantive and comprehensive report

which was acceptable to all.

As we enter the next half-century of the United

Nations and the closing years of the twentieth century, it

is becoming increasingly clear that we, our children and

grandchildren will soon be living in a new era that is very

different from today’s. The last decades of this century

have set the stage for a major shift in global paradigms

that will forever change the way in which we live and

work.

In recent years, events such as the population

explosion, the ebbing of the ideological tide and the

technological and communications revolution have

brought to the fore such issues as the management of

food and resources, preservation of the environment, the

need to improve income distribution, education and health

care, and the promotion of civil rights and equalities,

democracy and good governance.

In the United Nations and elsewhere, there is a clear

indication that the prominence of such issues will

continue into the next century and beyond. If we are to be

able to address these issues, deal with them in an efficient

manner, go through the transition and adjust ourselves to

the paradigm shift, we need a concerted and

comprehensive approach. This approach should be

proactive rather than reactive and should be able to

provide a new course of action for future generations.

The development and implementation of such an

approach require leadership at the global level. As the

only international body that deals with a vast array of

global issues on a daily basis, the United Nations is in a

unique position to provide that leadership.

Thailand is convinced that, in order to be able to

assume a leadership role, it is imperative that the United

3

Nations first be reformed and revitalized at all three

levels — intergovernmental, organizational and managerial.

It is for these reasons that Thailand attaches great

importance to the work of the General Assembly’s five

working groups on United Nations reform. Thailand

believes that, if given the necessary political will and

cooperation from Member States, each of these working

groups will soon be able to make specific recommendations

to the General Assembly that would serve as salient

elements of a single comprehensive reform package.

It is unfortunate, however, that, in spite of the fact that

most of these working groups have been in existence for

two to three years, a compromise on crucial issues is

nowhere in sight. Furthermore, should this trend continue,

it is unlikely that we will see any substantial achievement

from these working groups in the near future.

This desolate scenario is certainly detrimental to the

future of the United Nations, especially when we are

merely a few steps away from the next century. It is the

belief of my delegation that, if we are to make any progress

in the work of the working groups, the time is now. The

more we hesitate and bicker, the less chance there will be

of any meaningful reform of the United Nations.

Due to the lack of progress in the work of some of the

working groups, some Member States have begun to

suggest that deadlines be imposed on their work. Thailand

does not believe that such deadlines are necessary. In fact,

Thailand believes that, within a year or two, if no serious

compromise is to be found, the momentum for reform

efforts will simply wither away. At that point, we will no

longer have to worry about deadlines or the efficiency and

effectiveness of the United Nations in managing itself and

in dealing with twenty-first-century issues. Without the

necessary reforms, the fate of the United Nations is sealed.

My delegation therefore wishes to call upon all fellow

Member States to redouble their efforts, in the spirit of

cooperation and compromise and for the benefit of the

greater whole, to help facilitate the work of the working

groups in the hope that, in the very near future, they will be

able to come up with practical recommendations to the

General Assembly and that, eventually, a comprehensive

reform package can be formulated. What is indispensable

for the twenty-first century is a more capable, more

representative, more accountable and better managed United

Nations.

Year after year, we speak about the need to reform the

United Nations. Year after year, we come back to the same

problem: the willingness or, to be more precise, the lack of

willingness of Member States to see the United Nations

become what they themselves said the United Nations

should become. The United Nations cannot be reformed

simply by lip-service. No meaningful reform of the

United Nations can take place without the political,

material and financial support of its Members. The failure

of Member States to meet their financial obligations to

the United Nations, in particular, not only undermines the

United Nations ability to reform but, more importantly, in

actuality is the root cause of some of the United Nations

current inefficiencies. It is for this reason that my

delegation finds it politically and legally unacceptable for

Member States intentionally to withhold their assessed

contributions to the United Nations on any grounds

whatsoever.

When my delegation speaks about United Nations

leadership, we are referring specifically to two sources of

leadership. The first is the General Assembly, as it is the

most universal and, undeniably, the most important organ

of the United Nations. The other is the Secretary-General

as the chief administrative officer of the Organization.

As far as the General Assembly is concerned, my

delegation believes that it is essential that the

pre-eminence of the General Assembly vis-à-vis other

principal organs of the United Nations continue to be

emphasized. This pre-eminence should be not only in

words, but also in reality. The General Assembly must be

the ultimate decision-making body on all important

questions, as specified in the Charter, and not simply a

rubber stamp for decisions or agreements concocted

elsewhere. The General Assembly must truly be the voice

of and moral compass for the international community.

As for the Secretary-General, my delegation is of the

view that the twenty-first century demands that the chief

executive officer of the United Nations be someone with

exemplary courage and vision. That person must have the

courage to take bold initiatives, to stand up for what he

or she believes is right as well as to promote and defend

the interest of the greater whole. He or she must have the

vision and the managerial adeptness to turn the United

Nations into one of the most efficient and purposeful

international institutions of our time. Due to the

increasingly demanding responsibilities of the Secretary-

General, Thailand is inclined to support the idea that the

posts of Deputy Secretary-General be created and that

these deputies be empowered to act on behalf of the

Secretary-General in certain areas of his or her

overwhelming responsibilities. Moreover, in order to be

able to perform his or her functions with full efficiency

4

and without the interference of undue external pressures, a

United Nations Secretary-General should serve only one

term in office, be it of five or seven years.

Through close coordination and cooperation between

the General Assembly and the Secretary-General, a

comprehensive approach for the future can be developed

and implemented with efficiency. The development and

implementation of this new approach should be guided by

the main purposes of the United Nations, namely, the

maintenance of international peace and security and the

promotion of global economic and social development.

These dual responsibilities are the raisons d’étre of the

United Nations. They have come to symbolize the efforts

towards global cooperation and my delegation believes that

their goals should continue to be pursued with vigour and

the fullest cooperation from United Nations Member States.

In this connection, my delegation wishes to commend

Mr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Secretary-General, for his

initiatives on “An Agenda for Peace” and “An Agenda for

Development”. By having the foresight to come up with

these very important documents in the early years of this

decade, the Secretary-General has provided us with

blueprints for the future upon which we can plan and

visualize a new direction for a new United Nations.

As I pointed out earlier, there is a clear trend that the

main issues that will confront us in the future are those of

economic and social development. The key concepts for the

twenty-first century are sustainable economic growth and

sustainable human and social development. For this reason,

my delegation believes that now is the time for greater

attention to be given to these issues. This belief does not

stem from the fact that Thailand herself is a developing

country, but rather from the realization that a solid

economic and social foundation is an indispensable

prerequisite for sustainable peace and prosperity.

At the international level in particular, functional

cooperation in these areas could create a network of

interdependence based on goodwill and mutual interests,

which could help eliminate conflicts and misunderstandings.

It is with this belief that Thailand has consistently been a

strong advocate of United Nations activities in the field of

economic and social development, as well as humanitarian

activities, and has been an active participant in the efforts

to reform the mechanisms of the United Nations in these

areas. A good example of Thailand’s commitment to the

United Nations development effort is her agreement to host

the tenth session of the United Nations Conference on

Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in the year 2000. In

the meantime, we are pleased that the five major

international summits organized by the United Nations,

ranging from the United Nations Conference on

Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de

Janeiro in 1992 to Habitat II in Istanbul earlier this year,

have proved to be useful in enabling Member States to

focus on the various aspects of development and to

cultivate a common vision and a comprehensive strategy

for cooperation among themselves. We hope that the

outcome of such conferences will help convince Member

States of the need to render all necessary assistance and

cooperation to the United Nations for its efforts in these

areas.

But while we believe that international cooperation

could stimulate and promote development, we also believe

that development efforts should, first and foremost, begin

at home. As a developing country, Thailand has always

attached high importance to both economic growth and

social development and has aspired to achieve an

equilibrium between the two. This is evident in all of

Thailand’s national development plans. Currently Thailand

is entering its eighth five-year national economic and

social development plan. We are particularly proud of this

plan, since, for the first time, the main focus is on human

development: it is a human-centred national development

plan. It is not by chance that the focus of this plan

coincides with recent efforts of the United Nations and

with the United Nations development strategy spelt out in

the Secretary-General’s “An Agenda for Development”

(A/48/935). In fact, the plan has been drawn up so as to

complement and respond to development efforts at all

levels: local, national, regional and global.

As a country of 60 million people, Thailand sees that

human and social development are the keys to national

development, since without any doubt a nation’s most

precious resource is its citizens. For this reason, through

the years the Thai Government, often under the direct

royal guidance of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej,

has been implementing hundreds of royal national

development projects, ranging from environmental

protection to education, from agriculture to public health

care. Some of these projects, such as narcotic suppression

through the introduction of crop substitution, are

internationally recognized and are being implemented in

close cooperation with the United Nations and other

international agencies. As this is the year that the Thai

nation celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of His Majesty’s

ascension to the throne, we are more determined than

ever to continue on this path and to rededicate ourselves

to advancing the cause which is so close to the heart of

5

our beloved monarch. Therefore, in the years ahead

Thailand will continue to work hard and to cooperate

closely with the international community in order to realize

the goals of sustainable economic, human and social

development.

An important instrument through which States can

realize their economic and social development goals is

international trade. It is therefore essential that all States be

treated with fairness and be given the same opportunities in

the international marketplace. This is the basic principle

behind the establishment of the World Trade Organization.

However, what we see now is a disturbing tendency on the

part of some States to use non-trade issues, such as human

rights and labour standards, as leverage in trade

negotiations. Even more alarmingly, we are seeing an effort

by some to exercise extraterritorial powers through

domestic legislation, impinging upon the freedom of other

States to pursue independent foreign policies and trading

practices.

My delegation cannot emphasize strongly enough the

importance of keeping trade separate from other issues.

Trade must remain free and open and not be held hostage

to dissolute motives. Non-trade issues must not be brought

in to be used as a smokescreen disguising neo-protectionist

policies and practices. To allow such a phenomenon to

continue would only undo the gains that we have made

over the past half century.

As mentioned above, Thailand believes in the time-

proven notion that the benefits of functional cooperation in

the field of economic and social development could have a

positive spillover effect on efforts for the maintenance of

international peace and security. However, this does not

mean that Thailand is idly waiting for such an effect to

materialize. On the contrary, as in the past, Thailand has

continued to be active in the field of international peace and

security and follows with vigilance the political and security

developments in various parts of the world. We are keeping

a watchful eye on, among other things, the peace process in

Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fragile peace efforts in the

Middle East and the unfolding situations in such diverse

places as Angola, Haiti and Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and

Western Sirmium.

In particular, as a member of the Special Committee

on Peacekeeping Operations and the coordinator of the

Non-Aligned Movement for this issue, Thailand is very

much in support of the idea that the United Nations overall

policy on peacekeeping should be re-examined. We believe

that there should be clear guidelines and principles with

regard to the scope, depth, objectives and mandates of

United Nations peacekeeping activities in order to ensure

that United Nations involvement in conflict situations will

be practical, meaningful and cost-effective.

At a time when the United Nations is facing a

financial crisis, Thailand also supports the notion that

there should be clear time-frames for United Nations

peacekeeping operations. Of the existing 16 United

Nations peacekeeping operations, two date back to the

1940s, one to the 1960s and two to the 1970s. These five

peacekeeping operations, which have been running for

decades, have thus far cost the United Nations and its

Member States almost $240 million and, more

importantly, the lives of 461 peacekeepers. Looking at

these figures, one cannot but wonder whether it is the

United Nations that is not keeping the peace, or the

parties involved that are not willing to have peace.

Whatever the answer is, the international community is

paying a high price for these operations, without any end

in sight.

As international and internal conflicts rage on, the

armaments business continues to prosper. My delegation

is gratified that the Disarmament Commission, at its 1996

session, was able to adopt the guidelines for international

arms transfers. Despite their lack of legal force, the

guidelines are an important step towards eliminating

illegal armaments, especially small arms, which in our

lifetime have caused too many losses and too much

suffering to peoples in all corners of the world.

My delegation believes that, parallel to this effort to

regulate the flow of arms, there should also be methods

of bringing to justice the perpetrators of crimes and

violence against humanity. It is in this belief that my

delegation welcomes the Economic and Social Council’s

United Nations Declaration on crime and public security

as well as the efforts to establish an international criminal

court. Even though these mechanisms will not make our

lives more secure, they nevertheless give us hope that

from now on there will be punishment to suit the crime.

6

As far as human destruction is concerned, nothing is

more terrifying than the threat of a nuclear holocaust. For

this reason, my delegation is pleased that the

Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) has now

been adopted by the General Assembly and is currently

open for signature by interested States. Once in its

operational phase, the Treaty will be an important

complement to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),

which was extended indefinitely in 1995.

However, neither the CTBT nor the NPT are adequate

guarantees against the threat of a nuclear holocaust. My

delegation believes that the only practical way to safeguard

the world against a nuclear catastrophe is to eliminate all

nuclear weapons. This can be done on a step-by-step basis

within a definite time-frame. As a starter, in the spirit of

the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice

earlier this year, we could deny the legality of the use or

the threat of use of nuclear weapons. Eventually, we can

make the total elimination of all nuclear weapons and their

delivery systems, as well as of other weapons of mass

destruction, a top priority for the twenty-first century.

Last year, our Heads of State and Government

gathered here to pay tribute to the United Nations for its 50

years of service to humankind and to renew their pledge to

continue to work with the United Nations to realize the

hopes and dreams of the framers of the United Nations

Charter. Through the Declaration adopted on that occasion,

our leaders also promised to

“give to the twenty-first century a United Nations

equipped, financed and structured to serve effectively

the peoples in whose name it was established”.

(resolution 50/6, fifth preambular paragraph)

Today, I am here to reaffirm that pledge and to

propose further that the United Nations assume the

leadership role that would help guide us into the next

century. In providing this leadership, the United Nations

need not depart from what it has been doing for the past 50

years. The United Nations should continue to do what it

does best in areas such as the maintenance of international

peace and security; economic, human and social

development; humanitarian emergencies; promotion of

democracy and human rights; environmental protection; and

technical cooperation. The only differences are that in

future the United Nations will have to do these things much

better and in a more effective and efficient manner. And,

more importantly, the Organization will have to project a

clearer sense of purpose and direction, which will help

Member States and their peoples formulate a universal and

comprehensive approach to cope with the emerging

paradigms of the twenty-first century.

We are about to cross the threshold into a new and

challenging era. Through the leadership of the United

Nations, we can turn the challenges into rewards and

opportunities.